The Onion Peeler
By Malcolm Whyman,
Copyright 2011 Malcolm Whyman.
Smashwords Edition
License Notes
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"As life’s onion you peel
And each layer you reveal
You may be surprised to discover
Whatever you do and I’m sure that it’s true
One thing always leads to another"
Chorus to the song Tony the Tramp by Malcolm Whyman.
For my wife Julie Whyman, without whose help, encouragement and dedication to the detail, this book would never have been completed.
Thanks to Paula Blackman for her editorial work.
Thanks to Stacey McMullen for preparing and editing this book for online publication.
And many thanks to Dave Pike for his help & encouragement.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
My first remembered experience was courtesy of Hermann Goering. It was the night of the Nottingham Blitz, 9th May 1942. Hull had been attacked the night before and London the night after, when the capital suffered one of its worst raids of the war. I was two years old.
The air raid sirens were screaming and searchlights probed the night sky. My mother hurriedly zipped me into my powder blue siren suit, an all in one garment similar to a babygrow. The siren suit was recommended by the government; it was very warm and a quick way of covering night attire prior to going down to the air raid shelter. Mr. Churchill, the Prime Minister, wore one; his too was powder blue. Safely zipped up, my mother carried me downstairs and into the Anderson shelter[1] in the back garden of my grandparents’ house. My grandmother and my great aunt Julie were already there, crouched on one of the two single planks that served as seating in the dark, dank shelter. It was a clear night: the apple trees in the garden were visible through gaps in the sacking that hung over the shelter entrance. A tall Leylandii tree in our neighbours’ back garden was in silhouette and pointing an accusing finger up into the night sky. My grandfather, a veteran of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War and the First World War, was on fire watching duty. A few bombs didn’t faze him. He refused to go down to the shelter despite the pleas of his wife and daughter, and instead made tea for us all, much to the amazement of my grandmother; it was the first time in their married life that he had even ventured into the kitchen. There was some speculation among the women that he might also manage to boil an egg, but they were never to find out. He considered tea making to be the thin end of the wedge and the kitchen the domain of women.
The anti-aircraft guns, installed in a patch of woodland close to what is now Raleigh Island, opened fire, almost drowning out the roar of bomber formations flying overhead. Bombs fell half a mile away, demolishing a row of houses but missing their intended target, the Raleigh Cycle factory, which was now churning out munitions.
I was too young to appreciate the danger we were in, but I had never seen my mother and grandmother so distressed and, like a contagion, their fear and tension enveloped me. Great Aunt Julie, a devout Christian, put her fate in the hands of God and prayed silently. For some years after, I ran for home on hearing an approaching aircraft. The adults could distinguish the sound of enemy planes, which, unlike our own, made a throbbing sound. The reason for this was because the German pilots desynchronised their engines to confuse sound detection devices fitted to the anti-aircraft guns
We remained in the damp, musty shelter for what seemed like an eternity, until the guns ceased firing. A long, continuous blast from the air-raid siren signalled the all clear. The guns fell silent: the raid was over. We could return to our beds but we would have difficulty sleeping. Two raids in one night could not be discounted.
I was born just after war was declared, in the village of Asfordby, not far from the market town of Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. My parents, both originally from Nottingham, moved to Asfordby two years before I was born, when my father, a civil servant, secured a job at The Ministry of Defence gun range. When war was declared, my father, despite his reserved occupation status, promptly joined the army. Our bungalow was in close proximity to the gun range, a marshalling yard and a power station. My parents feared that these would become targets for German bombers and decided that my mother and I would be safer living with her parents back in Nottingham. As it transpired, there was wisdom in their decision: Asfordby was bombed and though our house was spared, others on the road were badly damaged.
My grandparents’ house was at 26 Westholme Gardens, off Western Boulevard, a part of the main Nottingham ring road. A 1930’s semi-detached set at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was in an area favoured by the respectable lower middle class. The house was home to my grandfather, Alfred Edward Greenwood, and his wife, Pelham, nee Newbold (named by her father after Pelham Road in the Nottingham city centre; he had remembered the name Pelham and thought it attractive), and her sister, my great aunt Julie, known to us all as Aunt Julie. They lived quiet, insular lives, visited only by close relatives, most frequently by their daughter Audrey, her husband, Bill, and my cousins, Joan, Pamela, and David, who were all of a similar age to me. Less often, Great Aunt Alice, my grandmother’s older sister, would call on us, usually on a Sunday when she felt it her duty to encourage her sisters to attend the Methodist church in Nottingham City centre where Granny and Grandad were married. Granny and Aunt Julie rarely left the house and came to view their Sunday outings as a rare treat. Her two older sisters were thin, but my granny was round and fat. On climbing the stairs, she would do a small trump on every step causing us children to snigger, much to the embarrassment of our parents.
My grandfather was of medium height, gnarled and stocky, with hostile blue eyes set in a bald Germanic head. Observing him sitting on the back door step, his few remaining teeth clamped on his pipe, it was difficult to imagine that he had once been a man of passion, but as my mother confided to me some years later, Dada (as his children called him), was in his youth not a man to be crossed or denied. My grandmother was originally engaged to Grandad’s younger brother, Ernest, but Grandad had stolen Granny’s affections and married her. His father was outraged at what he termed ‘this treacherous alliance’ and disinherited my grandfather in favour of his younger brother. Unwelcome in his father’s house and with career options limited, my grandfather joined the army, serving in China and South Africa and in France during the First World War. During his years in the service he had fathered two daughters, my Aunt Audrey, born in 1915, and a year later my mother, Alma, in 1916.
Service life must have left him with a taste for adventure, for on his demobilisation at the end of The Great War, and without consulting his wife; he sailed for Canada and the Alaskan gold fields. It was some sixty odd years since the deposits had been discovered, so one assumes that the pickings were lean by the time he arrived: and so it proved to be. It was almost a year before he decided that prospecting for gold was heart breaking and unprofitable and booked his passage back to England. During his time in Canada he had failed to support my grandmother and their children. This had forced her to take out an order against him for non-payment of maintenance. As a consequence, he was arrested as soon as he set foot on English soil. Hauled before the court, an order was made against him for back and future maintenance. His reaction to this humiliation was an indication of his stubborn and begrudging nature. He distributed my grandmother’s maintenance payments among several Post Offices, obliging her to travel extensively in order to collect them, and this in an age when motorcars were rare and public transport was not as comprehensive as it is today.
It was at this time that Aunt Julie left her job in service and joined her sister. No doubt Granny needed all the support she could get, both emotional and physical. Incredibly, given the vindictive way in which my grandfather had behaved, reconciliation was somehow achieved. One might be tempted to believe that it was cheaper for my grandfather to be re-united with his wife than to live apart from her, and that Granny was prepared to put up with the old curmudgeon for the sake of financial security for herself and her daughters. Whatever the arrangements, Aunt Julie remained with the household, helping with the chores and child rearing. Given Grandad’s taciturn nature and Granny’s timidity, Aunt Julie’s presence was of vital importance to Granny’s mental well-being, as she always had her sister at her side to confide in and join her in a united front against Grandad if he ever looked as though he might get out of hand. Although I never heard a whisper that might suggest domestic violence, I suspect he was the type of man who wouldn’t hesitate to inflict mental cruelty.
Some semblance of a normal marriage must have been maintained as a son, Alfred, was born in 1923, two years after their reconciliation, but Granny didn’t have much enthusiasm for the physical side of her marriage. After the birth of Alfred she withdrew all sexual favours, having decided that three children were enough. Understandably, Grandad didn’t think much of this arrangement, once remarking to my father that he had two women in the house and couldn’t get his leg over either of them. I doubt whether he would have approached Aunt Julie, she being a spinster virgin with a strong sense of Christian morality. Abstinence notwithstanding, by the time my mother and I arrived, the three of them had settled down to make the best of it. It was possible my grandfather might have had a bit on the side, but he was an unlikely ladies’ man, and probably concluded that he was too comfortable where he was to rock the boat.
Granny’s domestic skills were somewhat limited, so it fell to Aunt Julie to direct the household affairs and chivvy a sense of order and routine into her sister. I think that Granny, rather than being lazy, was just an unenthusiastic housewife, a disposition she passed on to her daughters, for neither of them could be described as house-proud. Aunt Julie lived with her own personal tragedy. As a young woman she had been engaged to a young man (whom my mother described as a religious maniac) who had thrown himself off the Trent Bridge and drowned. The slaughter of the Great War had scythed down most of the young men of marriageable age and Aunt Julie, unable to find a husband, remained a spinster. There was only one occasion when I witnessed her lose her fabled equilibrium. My grandfather kept a large parsley bed and had come to an arrangement with the fishmonger who visited the street once a week in his fish van. For a few coppers off the fish price, my grandfather allowed the fishmonger to take whatever parsley he needed to decorate his fish. On one occasion, before picking his parsley the fishmonger had taken the opportunity to relieve himself behind the garden shed. Aunt Julie, unaware of him, came to hang out the washing and caught sight of his manhood in full flow. Screaming, she ran weeping into my grandmother’s arms. Of course she had seen the appendages of her great nephews when they were babies, but later confided to my mother that she had no idea that they grew so big. Needless to say, the fishmonger had to manage without his parsley thereafter. My mother would gleefully recount the ‘disgraceful’ episode to other female members of the family, in which the offending organ, like the fish in a fisherman’s tale, grew larger by the telling.
There were no labour saving devices in the 1940’s: washing was done by hand, and though electric irons were available, neither Granny nor Aunt Julie were prepared to use them, considering such innovations dangerous. They preferred instead the old fashioned flat irons heated up on a prehistoric gas stove. There was no fridge, so keeping food cold was a problem; a marble slab in the pantry was all that stood between sour milk and liquid butter. Sometimes in very hot weather the items to be kept cold were sat in a bowl of cold water. Carpet cleaning was done first by sprinkling the carpet with used tea-leaves to lift the dust, and then sweeping them up with an old Ewbank[2]; this left the house smelling of stale tea for some days afterwards. The only source of entertainment in the house was a large wooden radio, but only Grandad was allowed to twiddle with the knobs. Throughout the day the radio was largely silent, and after the nine o’clock evening news, when the old man insisted on everyone going to bed, it was switched off. We did have a piano in the front room. My mother would sometimes play and sing to it, but only when the old tyrant was out. The piano came into its own on birthdays and at Christmas time when Aunt Audrey, a fairly accomplished player, knocked out all the old favourites such as ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain’. I don’t remember Grandad ever joining in such sessions but he wasn’t sufficient of a killjoy to complain about them. Perhaps it was because Uncle Bill kept him occupied with a few games of cribbage in the dining room.
I can’t imagine that my grandfather had always been the way he was. In his youth he must have had a lighter side to his nature; after all, he did manage to charm my grandmother into marriage. Watching him gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles turned white, it was a possibility sometimes mooted by my mother that he suffered from some form of battle fatigue; certainly he had spent long periods in the trenches during the First World War. When I was a small boy, I did attempt to engage him on the subject but he always seemed reluctant to talk about his experiences. After the First World War, if a soldier was physically fit when demobbed that was all that mattered. Little was known about such phenomena as post-traumatic stress disorder. I have said some unkind things about my grandfather but it is possible that he was attempting to deal with shellshock, a condition that was beyond his control. In later life, when working with other First World War veterans I encountered similar behaviour, but as a child I was unable to understand and looked upon him as the all round bogey-man. Fortunately I had the protection of three women who understood him better than I did. I was well looked after and nurtured, but not overly spoilt. Much attention was paid to good manners in general and table etiquette in particular. Slang words were frowned upon as vulgar and common. My wife snorts with laughter now when I tell her that one of our neighbours once gave me a cowboy outfit for being the best mannered little boy on the road. With my credentials for good behaviour having been duly endorsed by the neighbours, I was free to discover a wayward life of my own, the way to which lay through the back garden gate my grandfather had constructed to give direct access to a few acres of long abandoned allotments.
The allotments were now overgrown with trees and shrubs and dotted around with derelict brick sheds. They were known to local people as the Cherry Orchards, which they may have been at some time in the past, but search as I may, I never found a cherry tree. I was about three or four years old when I was tall enough to unlatch the gate and make a few small, tentative excursions. I must have been observed, for subsequently the gate was tied shut. I was not deterred and soon developed the patience to untie the gate and resume my wanderings. This was bliss compared with the stultifying atmosphere and discipline of a house full of old fogies and my grandfather’s oppressive presence. Stretching across the top of the old allotments, and at their outer edge, was a path known as Colliers’ Pad. As its name suggests, it was used by miners from the Aspley and Whitemoor estates and served as a short cut on their journey to and from the Radford Pit. Decades of coal dust dropping from their work clothes had turned the Pad coal-black. For some months, the Pad was as far as I dared go. Later, out rambling with older boys, I was delighted to discover a fully functioning farm, with fields of corn and cows grazing in pastureland. This was between Chalfont Drive and Aspley Lane, barely half a mile from our house.
During the summer of 1944, Chalfont Drive, the next road up from Westholme Gardens, was in the process of being extended to what would become the local Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency. German and Italian prisoners of war were bussed in from their camps to dig the foundations and lay the hardcore for the road. I busied myself chucking lumps of rock about in an attempt to help out. My efforts, I decided, were appreciated, for they caused much amusement among the prisoners who always gave me a brushing down before I made my way home. My mother disapproved of these visits, perhaps fearing that I might be accused of fraternising with the enemy, but to me they were just decent men who liked having me around.
Beyond the Colliers’ Pad was a patch of scrubland, sometimes used as a football pitch by the local boys, and home to an enormous elm tree. For many years there had been speculation as to how tall it really was, but no one ever came up with the answer. I decided to ask my uncle Alf. Uncle Alf, first mate in the Merchant Navy, was home on leave after being shipwrecked yet again. He assured me that I had come to the right man. Uncle Alf was one of my heroes: he kept a revolver in his kit bag for quelling mutinies and warding off pirates. While an apprentice, he had climbed the tallest mast of a sailing barque and had stood on the topping off button. If anyone could climb that tree and measure it, Uncle Alf was the man. He rummaged around in his kit bag and retrieved a small polished box, which I assumed must be a large measuring tape, and accompanied by a gang of excited local boys determined not to miss the drama, we set off for the mighty elm. Having reached the tree, we were surprised to see Uncle Alf continue on past it until he was a hundred feet or more away. He then opened his box and took out a strange looking instrument, sighted it on the tree, and pronounced that it was ninety-three feet, two and a half inches exactly. Disappointed at not witnessing an heroic climb, we demanded to know how he could be so sure. He told us that he would reveal the mysteries of the sextant when our maths could cope with it, and that an officer and a gentleman didn’t tell lies. With this we had to be satisfied. Alas, he never got around to teaching me how to use his sextant.
With the big elm behind me providing a prominent landmark, I set off for more distant adventures, discovering a landscape of rolling hillocks (known locally as the Humps and Hollows), and beyond that an ancient woodland, which in springtime was carpeted with bluebells. A stream meandering through the wood was clogged with empty shell casings. Nearby, the camouflaged barrels of anti-aircraft guns jutted menacingly through the foliage. On hearing the voices of their crews, I decided that I probably shouldn’t be there and turned back. It wasn’t the Brazilian rain forest, but to a diminutive Jungle Jim it was a notable discovery, and later on a useful one: in the harsh winter of 1947, when fuel was almost unobtainable, I was able to return with my mother on a logging expedition. This was the winter when friends and I built an igloo in the turning circle at the end of the road. We built it in November and it was still there in the May.
My attempts to emulate Marco Polo were seriously disrupted when I had to start school at Whitemoor Infants, where the Education Authorities attempted to bring some order to the uncharted waters of my mind. I was four and a half years old and my only academic achievement so far was the ability to spell the word ‘little’. It impressed my mother, but looking through the windows of the long row of classrooms, and the bent heads of the pupils scribbling away, I was gripped with anxiety and refused to let go of my mother’s hand. There was no means of escape as she led me down the unfamiliar corridors, which smelt unpleasantly of boiling cabbage and sour milk. My destination was Miss Maltby’s infant class where clay modelling was in progress. This didn’t seem too bad, and before long I was engrossed in making an egg in an egg-cup, for which I received lavish praise from Miss Maltby and had the honour of having it placed on a shelf with similarly prized specimens. There they remained for such time as it took for our embryonic egos to drain out of them, after which they were discreetly returned to the clay tub to be recycled into other ‘major works of art’.
When my mother returned to collect me at the end of the afternoon session, I was able to tell her that I quite liked school, little knowing that playing with clay would be gradually phased out and replaced with times tables learned by rote, and an introduction to pen and ink. I was left handed, and though the barbaric practice of making left handers write with their right hand had been abandoned, it is no easy thing to push, rather than drag a pen loaded with ink across a page without blotting it. Writing with the left hand also covers what has just been written, making the task even more difficult. As a consequence, my written work would have pushed the proverbial spider into the upper echelons of penmanship.
For six months I bore it with fortitude, not helped by the onset of the severe stammer that was to blight the rest of my school life and beyond. But respite came in the form of chicken pox: a period of three weeks’ quarantine at home was recommended to allow it to run its course, but with the caveat that I was forbidden to mix with other children. It was going to be a lonely three weeks. Casting around for some activity to relieve the boredom, I started work on an elephant trap outside the back garden gate where it led out onto the old allotments. The intended victim was my grandfather, as elephants were rare in our neck of the woods. In order to trap him, I would have to complete the work before Sunday, when the old man used the gate on his way out to his afternoon walk. This gave me six days to prepare it. The soil was soft and sandy, so I made good progress, covering the pit with foliage at the end of each digging session. After six days of toil, the trap was nearly two feet deep. I was so engrossed in my work that I failed to hear my mother calling me in for tea. I was just completing the finishing touches when my mother discovered me. “Dada could break a leg down there,” she said, peering into the pit. “You’d better fill it in after tea.” I feigned innocence, mumbling something about digging the trap to deter scrumpers from stealing our apples.
Some days later, still smarting at the discovery of my elephant trap, I decided to examine the contents of Grandad’s shed. Ever cautious of my curious fingers tampering with his belongings, Grandad always made sure his shed was locked and the key placed on its hook on the kitchen dresser. After diverting my granny and Aunt Julie from their kitchen duties, I sneaked the key from its hook, opened the shed door, and spent a happy hour, undetected, riffling through all the forbidden delights: saws, planes, machetes, chisels, and other sharp implements, the purpose of which were a mystery. Mission completed without mishap, I discovered that in my excitement I had misplaced the shed key. What to do? No time to hang about, just shut the shed door and hope for the best. Grandad was furious and convinced that I was responsible for the keys’ loss. For a week he was calling for retribution. My granny, Aunt Julie and my mother stood their ground and defended me. “You have no proof,” they told him. Then a week later I found the key; it had worked its way into the lining of my jacket. The problem was I couldn’t just hang it back up.
My solution was to push it through a hole in the pocket of Grandad’s gardening coat and into the lining, similar to the way that I had originally lost it. When the subject of the shed key came up again, I suggested to my mother that she take one more look in Grandad’s gardening coat. The old ogre received both barrels from the women of the house. His discomfort and embarrassment were acute. This was better than an elephant trap and nearly as good as Christmas. I wouldn’t like to give the impression that my grandfather and I were always at war; we did have a truce from time to time: a bit like Christmas day in the trenches. He would take me on short walks; he was knowledgeable concerning nature and taught me what could be eaten, such as elderberries, the new leafy shoots of hawthorn trees, which he called ‘bread and cheese’, and in the autumn the haw berries. He helped me overcome my fear of bees by encouraging me to put my hand into our big lavender bush and allow the bees to crawl all over it. He once took me for a walk along the Trent Embankment, but let himself down. After warning me on several occasions to stay away from the water’s edge, he gave me a clip round the ear. Justified though he was, I bridled at this assault on my person and resumed hostilities immediately. I should have taken this incident as a warning: two years later, my father took my cousins and I on a similar trip, and while playing about near the water’s edge, I fell in and nearly drowned. The water was over my head when an elderly gentleman fished me out in the time-honoured manner, with the handle of his umbrella. To complete my embarrassment, my father removed all my wet clothing in front of my two female cousins and sundry spectators. I then had to travel home on the trolley bus with only my father’s jacket to cover my nakedness. Fortunately we were not living at my grandparents’ at that time, which saved me the further embarrassment of having to face my grandfather who, I was sure, would have had difficulty resisting the opportunity to snigger and gloat.
Chapter Two
When victory in Europe was announced a street party was organised. Tables were pushed together all down the street and covered with tablecloths. An array of party food, not seen for five years, appeared. Scarce items, such as tinned salmon and tinned fruit, were brought out of hoarding. Cakes and pastry were made using real eggs and precious butter. Eggs were so scarce during the war that, in our house, it was normal to have half an egg each. Elderly neighbours, rarely seen, joined in and did their bit. The sense of relief brought people back to life. The residents of Westholme Gardens had stuck together and had looked after each other throughout the war. Now, at last, there was a feeling of optimism; they were learning how to enjoy themselves again. Their men would soon be coming home. But not Mr. Stevens from No.6: to his disgust, at the age of forty-two, he had received his call up papers and been sent off to fight the Japanese. At that time, forty-two was considered middle-aged. When I met him twenty years later he was still grumbling about it. That he was lucky enough to have survived to express his umbrage didn’t seem to have occurred to him. By the time victory in Japan was announced, and celebrated with another street party, we all knew that he was alive and well, which added extra poignancy to the celebrations. When my grandfather joined the other ancient firewatchers to put out their last pretend incendiary bomb and curl up their stirrup pumps for the last time, we knew the war was truly over.
When the war in Europe ended on 8th May 1945, I was about five and a half years old. The gas mask that all children took to school could finally be discarded, as could the blackouts that covered all house windows. Rationing was still in force and would, with minor adjustments, remain so for some years to come.
As the first Christmas since the defeat of Germany approached, I was looking forward with exited anticipation to a visit from my father’s youngest brother, Uncle Barry, not least because on such occasions as birthdays and other celebrations, he never failed to bring me some unusual and unique present. Although I had a sneaking respect for my Grandfather and greatly admired my mother’s brother, Uncle Alf who was serving as an officer in the merchant navy, I received little if any affection from either of them. My greatest love and affection was reserved for Uncle Barry. His visits were occasions of unalloyed joy for me. Most important of all, he came to see me and then spent hours performing conjuring tricks usually involving a book and an old silver sixpence, which he gave to me at the end of his visit. Here was a true kindred spirit who knew how to stir the imagination of a small boy, perhaps being only seven years older than myself; it was not too long since he had been a small boy himself. His gifts had a whiff of the subversive about them in contrast to the stuffy, self-improving variety favoured by most of my relatives. He made these presents himself and my mother viewed them with great suspicion, suspecting that rather than being tutored in the ways of righteousness, prescribed by the older generation, I was being taught the fine arts of sabotage. This was hardly surprising, as his presents usually resembled complicated explosive devices with wires and batteries connected to small, mysterious contraptions that ticked and whirred. I am sure my mother suspected some diabolical conspiracy, fuelled by her firmly held belief that all the Whyman males had anarchic tendencies and marched to a different drum. I think, she was afraid that I might blow myself up, for no sooner had Uncle Barry left the house than my mother, her hands trembling, confiscated these potential bombs and hid them. The explanation being that I was too young for them at the moment. Of course I was furious and searched for them everywhere, rifling through chests of draws and the tops of wardrobes but to no avail. After months of virtually non-stop interrogation, she eventually confessed that she had buried these dangerous devices in the garden. This was a mistake. I at once set out upon a treasure hunt that brought me into direct conflict with my grandfather, who objected to the random excavation of his kitchen garden. My mother’s attempts to reduce Uncle Barry’s influence achieved nothing. She could only stand and watch as whenever he called on us, I received him with all the enthusiasm of a royal visit. He was however yet to produce his piece de resistance, which in my opinion elevated him to the status of a god.
Just before my seventh birthday, he took me to the Goose Fair and regardless of expense, accompanied me on a terrifying orgy of excitement, as we sampled all the most dangerous rides. He then encouraged me to try my luck on most, of the many amusements for which the fair is justifiably famous. Uncle Barry obviously knew that to children, quantity has a quality all of it’s own. By the end of our Goose Fair adventure, I was sticky and feeling slightly groggy, the result of too many choc-ices and too much candyfloss. I was festooned with balloons and fancy hats and clutching numerous fairground prizes, the winning of which had cost much more than they could ever be worth. My grandparents would have been most disapproving of such super spoiling but I would have been the envy of small boys everywhere.
My grandparents generation and to some extent my mother’s, still adhered to the old adage that a child should be seen and not heard. I think Uncle Barry grasped that I was in need of some robust, male attention and set out to provide it. There are times when a child needs to be made to feel special. Uncle Barry did this for me and it is a gift that I have carried with me all of my life.
Christmas 1945 would be the same ‘make and mend’ affair that it had been for the last four years. Crepe and coloured paper decorations were retrieved from boxes stored on the tops of wardrobes, and pinned up, at my insistence, in every room in the house, plus some new ones that my mother and I made our selves. My cousins, Pamela and Joan, came to spend Christmas Eve with me, all of us sleeping in the same bed: a novelty in itself, but combined with the excited anticipation of a visit from Santa Claus, we were unlikely to get much sleep: nor did we. On Christmas day, none of us could remember going to sleep as we were hoping to catch Santa filling our optimistically large pillowcases with presents. But we must have slept, for they were duly filled with all manner of stuff, some bought new and some second hand: it made no difference to us. The first boatloads of oranges were coming into the country, so we all got an orange: a rare treat during the war. The Canadian Red Cross donated Christmas parcels for the children of war-torn Britain and we received one of these between us, filled with sweets, chocolates, and small novelty toys. We were delighted with our parcel and to this day I try to buy Canadian Cheddar cheese as a small thank you.
On Christmas day, my father’s parents paid us a visit. My paternal grandfather, Grandpa Whyman, had also served in France during the First World War and been invalided out suffering from shell shock and deafness. As was usual on such visits Grandpa Whyman played a few games of cribbage with Grandad Greenwood, while my grandmothers, my mother, and my aunts, great and small, drank tea and nattered about their domestic concerns. My cousins and I were too busy with our Christmas presents to pay much attention to the adults. As darkness fell there was the usual singsong round the piano in the front room, but this time ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ had a great deal more significance. The world it seemed would very soon be free.
After victory in Japan our enemies had been defeated, but another one descended upon us: smog, the result of burning sub-standard coal in domestic fires and power stations. It killed thousands of the elderly and vulnerable in an epidemic of bronchitis and other lung conditions, until the Clean Air Act was passed and smokeless zones were established. When the smog came down we were allowed to leave school early, following our teachers in a crocodile to our various destinations. There must have been a dozen or more of these ‘pea soupers’, as they were called, every year throughout the 1940’s. During the war there were no streetlights, but after the war, when they were switched back on, it seemed to make little difference; we could still only see a few inches in front of our faces. Due to the good will of our teachers, and the kindness of older pupils, we all usually made it home without serious mishap.
Throughout 1946, the nation’s fighting men started to come home, and Westholme Gardens welcomed its heroes back in the time-honoured fashion. News of a homecoming quickly circulated among the neighbours. Mr. Sparks, in his grocery van that stocked almost everything that was available, came to the street twice a week. His visits provided an opportunity for the housewives to swap news and gossip. As a result, on the day each man or woman was due home, every house flew Union Jacks from its bedroom windows. There were twenty-six houses on Westholme Gardens that had sent twelve men and one woman to war, and all of them returned home without serious injury. But some of us were to learn that physical injury was only one of the hazards of war. Nevertheless, it was still a minor miracle[3]. I was hoping my father would be home for Bonfire Night, the first since 1938, but he was still in Yugoslavia. Bonfire Night was an opportunity for people to get rid of six years’ worth of accumulated junk, so we ended up with a bonfire nearly ten feet high in the turning circle at the bottom of the street. No one seemed bothered about scorched fences and burnt hedges, and there were a few of those before the night was out. Fireworks were rationed, so it was decided to pool them and take it in turns to light them. We now had most of our men back home and there was a carefree party atmosphere that lasted long into the night.
The run up to Christmas 1946 found me blighted with severe toothache and my first appointment with the dentist was arranged. It was discovered that I had several abscesses and some of my milk teeth needed removing. The suffocating sensation of the evil smelling rubber device used to deliver the gas sent me into an uncontrollable panic. I leaped out of the chair, tearing off the offending gas mask, and proceeded to dismantle gas pipes and other connected equipment, scattering instruments in all directions. Eventually, the dentist, his nurse and my mother managed to subdue me, and, held down by three pairs of hands, I succumbed to the gas. This experience left me with an abiding hatred of dentists, but in future the dentist was not going to be easily avoided. The National Health system was just getting into its stride and school children’s teeth were a priority. Accordingly, an examination took place at school to deal with all the bad teeth, green teeth, and in some instances no teeth at all.
Those needing treatment were sent to the Children’s Dental Clinic, on Chaucer Street in the centre of Nottingham. When the first victims returned to tell their tale, it emerged that the clinic was held in a long surgery lined with dentists’ chairs. There, men with blood-caked aprons, and blood-smeared hairy hands and arms, hauled the teeth out of the wretched mouths of terrified, weeping children, casting teeth nonchalantly into buckets already overflowing with gory diseased molars. If that didn’t scare the shit out of you, they also drilled and filled teeth without anaesthetic. This did not sound like a child friendly experience but more akin to the surgeon’s cabin on the HMS Victory at Trafalgar. I took all necessary action in order to avoid this horrible experience, including truancy if need be, and also destroyed the nurse’s notes that informed my parents that I needed treatment.
My father was the last service man on the road to return home and received the same flag waving welcome reserved for the other men and women. I was seven years old when he and my mother met me at the school gates. I had not seen him for three years and sprang into his arms like a monkey, a memory my father treasured until the day he died. My father was much distressed by the severity of my stammer and set about ensuring that I could defend myself in the likely event of bullying or teasing by other children. He had been a keen amateur boxer and had fought for his regiment. He set about teaching me to deliver a straight left by tying a ball of paper to a string and dangling it at head height from a branch of one of our apple trees. When I could hit the pretend nose ten times out of ten, he declared himself satisfied, saying, “It wouldn’t deter a skilled boxer, but skilled boxers don’t generally go about taking the mickey out of kids with speech impediments.” I was still an enthusiastic wanderer and treated the adjoining old allotments as my own personal fiefdom. While out beating my boundaries one day, I came across a circle of beautifully built, small, igloo shaped grass huts. They had certainly not been there the day before and seemed to have sprung up like mushrooms overnight. Fearing that the grass huts might be inhabited by a tribe of pygmies, I decided to go for reinforcements. I soon gathered together a band of local boys, and all armed to the teeth with spears and homemade bows and arrows, we sneaked through Grandad’s back garden and into the allotments. We approached the huts with extreme caution, bows and arrows at the ready. Standing before each hut, we called out for the inhabitants to surrender, and on receiving no reply, sent a volley of arrows flying through the entrance. Having had no response from the other huts, as we approached the last one we were disturbed to hear a snuffling and rustling coming from the interior. Our bravado vanished in an instant and we stood frozen to the spot as, very slowly, a hedgehog staggered out, blinking in the sunlight. On close examination, the huts proved to be expertly constructed, perfectly round and as delicately woven as a Persian carpet. It would be a few years before science fiction comics appeared, but had we been familiar with them, no doubt these extraordinary little houses would have been attributed to the work of extra-terrestrial beings. We used them as dens until they eventually disintegrated, but never discovered who had built them.
Uncle Alf returned home around the same time as my father, but all was not well, for though he was physically unharmed, he was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He had served on the ships of the Merchant Navy convoys taking supplies to Russia, and had survived when, on three separate occasions, his ship was torpedoed from underneath him. His symptoms included nightmares, during which he had flashbacks of the times he had spent in an open boat in the icy waters of the North Sea. He fought his depression bravely, but it would be a long time before he could go back to sea again. Desperate as he was to return, the Merchant Navy needed its officers to be one hundred per cent fit; for the time being he was unable to pass the medical.
With the war over, my family was now receiving the butcher’s bill. My Uncle Ken returned from the Royal Navy hospital where he had been recovering from a fall on the deck of the Ark Royal. He had severely damaged his back and would wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. My fathers’ sister, Aunt Sheila, served in the WAAF[4] and had one of her legs mangled in a barrage balloon cable. She was lucky not to lose her leg, and walked with a pronounced limp. Most tragic of all, my father’s brother, Uncle Lawson, had died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. My father, who for the moment only suffered from recurring bouts of sand fly fever, had been on one occasion blown out of his slit trench on the Salerno beachhead. He re-gained consciousness ten days later on a hospital ship bound for Alexandria, Egypt, completely black and blue all over his body. On another occasion, while serving as a despatch rider, he was attacked by a German plane and machine-gunned off the road. When he came to, he thought he was covered with blood from head to toe, but had in fact been thrown into a field of tomatoes. He had though received a bullet that went through his thigh and into the fuel tank of his motorbike, which fortunately didn’t explode. His wound was close to the Whyman family jewels; this was good news for my brothers and sister: another inch or two the wrong way and they would never have been born. For the moment my father was all right, but two World Wars had changed the face of my family forever.
With the birth of my brother Philip, in March 1947, my grandparents’ house was getting overcrowded. Uncle Alf needed peace and solitude in order to recover. Despite a number of attempts to get back to sea, the Merchant Navy still considered him unfit.
We spent the next year and a half living first with my mother’s sister, Audrey, and her family, and then with my father’s sister, Sheila, and her family, but still had no news of our council house. House building had not been a priority during the war, and with the return of millions of service men and women, the housing shortage, despite the government’s massive building programs, remained acute. Uncle Alf at last decided that if he couldn’t get back to sea, the next best thing would be to live near to it. He moved down to Plymouth where he landed a job in the ironmongery trade. He never gave up his ambition to rejoin the Merchant Navy and fifteen years later, having taken his Master’s ticket, he was taken back as a tanker captain. He was a brave and determined man.
With room now available at Granny’s, we moved back to Westholme Gardens, making this my fourth move in four years and, for me, yet another school, Robert Shaw Primary. Here the staff were more able to pay attention to the needs of individual pupils; they quickly sent my parents a letter informing them that, as my stammer was so severe, an appointment could be made for me at a newly opened Speech Therapy Clinic, ominously housed in the same building as the dental clinic, on Chaucer Street in Nottingham. After an examination, it was suggested that I could have some sort of operation on my throat, but there were risks attached to it. Mercifully, my mother turned it down, and I remained uncured. When I was ten and a half, I took the eleven plus exam and failed. Moving around from school to school didn’t help, and neither did my stammer.
Then, just before my brother Charlie was born, in October 1949, we were allotted our long awaited council house at 10 Orion Close, on the newly built Bilborough Estate. It had been a three-year wait. My new school, John Player Secondary on Denewood Crescent, Bilborough, had a bad reputation. It was separated into two schools, one for boys and one for girls, but there was no interaction between them. Our house was within the school’s catchment area and I had no other choice but to attend.
Our new council house was brick built, unlike most of the others on the estate which were constructed of steel and concrete. It had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a lounge, a dining room and kitchen downstairs, and, an unheard of luxury in those days, a downstairs toilet. Outside were two outhouses: one for coal and the other that we used as a shed. There was a good-sized garden, back and front, which pleased my father, as he had an inclination to indulge in a bit of horticulture. Living in other people’s houses, this was a pleasure that had so far been denied him and he proved to be an adept gardener. My mother was also pleased to be at last the mistress of her own house, particularly the kitchen, though her efforts in the culinary department were less successful than my father’s in the garden. We had no furniture, so everything had to be bought new, and it took some weeks before we had everything we needed, but eventually we settled down to what we all hoped would be blissful family life.
Player Secondary School, built around 1920, occupied the centre of Denewood Crescent and had earned a long-standing reputation for toughness. Its catchment area, which included Denewood Crescent, were where the residents of the Narrow Marsh slums had been re-housed some years before, following their demolition. Narrow Marsh was considered to be the worst slum in Europe. The ex-slum dwellers still retained some of their old habits and were said to keep their coal in the bath. Certainly the rag and bone men among them kept their horses and carts in their front gardens and were a common sight on the way to school. For me, coming from the leafy suburbs, it was a source of amusement, but just a fact of life for the residents. Knowing the history of the inhabitants of the estate, it was with some trepidation that I enrolled at the school where they sent their children. The pupils at Player School certainly looked a tough lot, many of them with skulls shaved to the bone and daubed with gentian violet: ringworm, scabies and impetigo were endemic. It was plain that most of the boys came from poor backgrounds of the ‘first up, best-dressed’ variety. Plimsolls in summer and Wellingtons in winter seemed to be the standard footwear. In the hungry ’50’s, all manner of eccentric clothing was pressed into service by cash-strapped parents. Cut down long trousers, old scout uniforms and ex-army great coats were so common that no one bothered to comment on them. By the standards of the other pupils, I was quite well dressed when I started at the school, but as my parents’ circumstances deteriorated I became indistinguishable from the rest; an almost total disregard for my personal appearance didn’t help matters.
With such a bunch of hard cases to deal with, the teachers had only one effective way of maintaining discipline: the strap. But unpleasant and painful as it appeared when I first started at the school, I soon learned that some straps were to be feared more than others. A few teachers favoured the regulation taws, a lightweight three-tongued strap. This was the only legal strap, but other teachers, realising that this ineffectual instrument was held in sneering contempt by most of the boys, opted to fashion more robust weapons of their own. These varied in weight and pain inducing properties, starting with the taws and ending the scale with the monster wielded by the metal work teacher, Mr. Leeman. This beast, made from half-inch thick industrial leather belting, could deliver a hand-numbing blow that remained painful for days. Needless to say, it was the most feared of all the straps. It spent most of its time pickling in a jar of vinegar, which stood on a shelf behind Mr. Leeman's desk. Pickling, we were told, made it doubly effective. Unfortunately for the teachers, the frequent use of the strap reaped diminishing returns as the boys became inured to it. Among ourselves we devised the correct way to receive it: that was to remain silent and expressionless, as though the blow had had no impact at all, and then to walk nonchalantly back to our desks. So strong was the code that it was rare to witness a boy disgrace himself by shedding a tear. The strap was used to punish minor offences such as talking, not paying attention and chewing gum and sweets in class. Anything major, such as deliberate disruption, or offering a teacher violence, was dealt with by the Headmaster, Mr. Jones. For truly heinous crimes, a boy could be caned on the stage at assembly.
Our education consisted of the talk and chalk variety and endless paragraphs copied from the blackboard. History embraced kings and queens, the dissolution of the monasteries and the Corn Laws. Geography mostly covered the British Empire. English literature attempted, but failed, to interest us in the classics. English language devoted much of its time to parsing sentences. Art was taught using powder paint and sugar paper: almost impossible materials to work with. As with most stammerers, reading out loud in class was torture. The teachers seemed to fall into two categories: those who never asked me to read out loud and others who apparently thought that I might derive some therapeutic benefit from the experience. The worst of the latter was the RI teacher, Mr. Bowley, who was also the school scoutmaster. I was delighted when in my second year, aged twelve, he was charged with sexually abusing some members of his scout group and promptly dismissed. Our teachers were hard working and dedicated, but they must have felt like missionaries attempting to save the souls of cannibals. Most of their pupils were semi-feral. Despite the boring nature of the lessons, our teachers deserve some credit: few pupils from Player’s were unable to read, write, and add up by the time they finished school.
In our first year, playtimes were dedicated to a game of marbles, which involved empty bullet cases. There were plenty of these about at the end of the war, apparently brought home by demobbed soldiers. There were also many live rounds in circulation. Boys would bash the end of the live cartridge with a brick, which resulted in some serious injuries and the occasional fatality. Empty bullet cases were used as the target in the marbles games and became the prime commodity in a complicated barter system. The most popular items traded were horror comics, chewing gum and lead soldiers. Odd pennies and halfpennies were acceptable when all else failed. All these items had a fixed exchange rate and disagreements or fights were rare.
My fellow pupils, for all their rough and ready appearance and lack of social graces, were as affable and kind-hearted as any set of young boys anywhere. Despite their war-like reputations, I experienced no attempts at bullying and none of them ever mocked or took the mickey out of my stammer. There were two or three boys with hair lips and cleft pallets but they were never subjected to mockery either, although they could have been prime targets. This was before the National Health System got around to correcting this condition. The school was, however, not without its bad apples: it did produce a couple of murderers. One pupil, David Denis, aged thirteen, hacked his grandparents to death with an axe. Another, Brin Masterman, unusually for Player School ex-pupils, became a prison officer in later life. He murdered his wife by pushing her down the stairs. I was involved in a friendly wrestling match with the latter while we were still at school, never thinking for a second that I might be locked in combat with a future murderer.
So far I had been given no opportunity to use my carefully nurtured straight left, but when the inter-house boxing tournament was announced (an event in which every boy was expected to take part), I was not unduly worried. I despatched my first three opponents, all nursing bloody noses, in the first rounds of the contests and was fairly confident of receiving a cup. After the third match however, the sports-master took me to one side and told me, on pain of being disqualified, to concentrate on the body in future. I was a bit miffed at this piece of advice, as I would be bereft of my killer punch. My next opponent was under no such constraints and I was soon receiving treatment for a bloody nose myself. I was understandably furious but knew better than to complain. Nearly sixty years later the injustice of it still rankles.
By the second year at school, the marbles players had discovered something infinitely more interesting: wanking. What is sometimes termed ‘the solitary vice’ was anything but! Classrooms were furnished with desks with lift up lids, behind which enthusiasts could indulge themselves without being observed by the teachers. The back row of the class was their prefered location and wanking races became their passion. The first to ejaculate was deemed the winner and small wagers were placed on the results. Teachers must have been aware of the activity but I don’t recall any of them ever drawing attention to it, even though it went on while lessons were in progress. It may have been school policy to ignore it providing it didn’t get out of hand, ha ha. By the time they had reached thirteen, the back row boys had graduated to the real thing. I came across three of them one evening while crossing a recreation ground that bordered the estate. A well-built girl of fourteen or fifteen, with swarthy features and lank, dark hair, was lying on the newly mown grass, her grubby bra hitched up under her chin, and an equally grubby pair of knickers thrown to one side. The three boys, all with their short trousers round their ankles, were fondling her big round breasts and taking it in turns to mount her, hopping on and off like frogs at mating time. She was lying there uncomplaining, and wearing the smile of a contented attention seeker. So engrossed were they in their newfound sport that they gave no thought to me; I passed quite close to them and they must have seen me.
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